(Dis)ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God
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Ayşegül Gündoğdu
Ayşegül Gündoğdu is a graduate of Dokuz Eylul University, Department of American Culture and Literature, received her MA and PhD from the same department. Her PhD is on Robert Coover and postmodern historiography. She still works at the same department and her areas of interest include postmodern American literature, American cinema, and disability studies. She also teaches courses on American and English literature, and American cinema.
Abstract
In “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, The Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” Lennard J. Davis writes that “[t]o understand the disabled body, one must return to the concept of the norm, the normal body […] because the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (2006: 3). As Davis questions the nature of the “normal,” Sarah, a deaf and mute woman in Mark Medoff’s Tony Award winning play Children of a Lesser God (1982), says to James, a speech teacher to the deaf, “you want me to be a deaf person so you can change me into a hearing person” (1982: 72). This play focuses on the relationship between Sarah, a deaf woman and her sign language teacher James who wants to save her from her disability so that she can be a “normal” person to have “normal” life like himself. In their professional and romantic relationship, her struggle is to have her own “normal” in a world which attempts to fit her into the categories of “the normal and the normal body” so that she will not be confined to her “disability.” Similarly, in The Shape of Water (2017), Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar winning, romantic-fantasy movie set in 1960s, Elisa, a mute woman who communicates with sign language like Sarah, begins to form a close bond with an “abnormal,” non-human/amphibian man who is kept hidden in a secret government laboratory during the Cold War years in America. In a surprising and interesting move, she starts to break the limits of her “confinement” through this “non-conforming” relationship. Accordingly, this chapter aims to discuss how these two women endeavor to break out of their “confinement” by challenging the norms of the “normal” and the “able,” which, in turn, becomes a means not only for a better understanding of these concepts but also for developing different and alternative ways of thinking about “not normal” and “disabled.”
Abstract
In “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, The Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” Lennard J. Davis writes that “[t]o understand the disabled body, one must return to the concept of the norm, the normal body […] because the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (2006: 3). As Davis questions the nature of the “normal,” Sarah, a deaf and mute woman in Mark Medoff’s Tony Award winning play Children of a Lesser God (1982), says to James, a speech teacher to the deaf, “you want me to be a deaf person so you can change me into a hearing person” (1982: 72). This play focuses on the relationship between Sarah, a deaf woman and her sign language teacher James who wants to save her from her disability so that she can be a “normal” person to have “normal” life like himself. In their professional and romantic relationship, her struggle is to have her own “normal” in a world which attempts to fit her into the categories of “the normal and the normal body” so that she will not be confined to her “disability.” Similarly, in The Shape of Water (2017), Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar winning, romantic-fantasy movie set in 1960s, Elisa, a mute woman who communicates with sign language like Sarah, begins to form a close bond with an “abnormal,” non-human/amphibian man who is kept hidden in a secret government laboratory during the Cold War years in America. In a surprising and interesting move, she starts to break the limits of her “confinement” through this “non-conforming” relationship. Accordingly, this chapter aims to discuss how these two women endeavor to break out of their “confinement” by challenging the norms of the “normal” and the “able,” which, in turn, becomes a means not only for a better understanding of these concepts but also for developing different and alternative ways of thinking about “not normal” and “disabled.”
Chapters in this book
- Acknowledgments 5
- Table of Contents 7
- Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
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Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
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Cinema and TV Series
- The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
- Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
- (Dis)ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
- Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
- “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
- Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
- Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
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Documentaries
- Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
- Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
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Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
- Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
- Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
- Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
- Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
- “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
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Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
- Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
- In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
- Index
Chapters in this book
- Acknowledgments 5
- Table of Contents 7
- Confinement Studies in American Popular Culture 1
-
Part I: Confinement Narratives on the Screen
-
Cinema and TV Series
- The Individual vs. the Institution: Narratives of Confinement in New Hollywood Cinema 15
- Trapped in Bluebeard’s Castle: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast as a Self-Contradictory Story of Empowerment and Imprisonment 31
- (Dis)ableing the Confinement: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God 47
- Transformative Power of Confinement and Subversion of Identity in The Experiment (2010) 63
- “Where the City Started and the Suburbs Ended”: The (Sub)urban Confinement of Post-Industrial America in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows 87
- Never Let Me Go: Home, Family, and Confinement in Umma 103
- Confinement and Consciousness: Exploring the ‘ Nomadic Consciousness’ in Maid 117
-
Documentaries
- Incarceration Documentaries after the Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography 133
- Dream in Place: Understanding Confinement through the Tactics of Fiction in Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack 151
-
Part II: Confinement Narratives from/about American Prisons
- Claudia Jones and Angela Davis: Literature in Confinement 171
- Confined to the Margins: Necropolitics, American Identity, and Racial Separation in Assata by Assata Shakur 185
- Into the Lone Star Labyrinth: Texas Prison System Reflects The Death Gate Cycle Prison 201
- Our Time on the Rock: Narrating Voluntary Confinement in Tommy Orange’s There There 217
- “Have You Ever Seen a More Focused Killing Machine?” The Extreme Spectacle of Carceral Punishment in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars 235
-
Part III: Confinement Narratives within Performances
- Taylor Swift’s American Retreat: Covid, Cardigans, and Confinement in folklore 253
- In The Devil's Grip: Competing Narratives of Confinement in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X Opera 269
- Index
